


He Was Eight Years Old

by Ferith12



Series: A Shining Brokenness [2]
Category: DCU
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dark, Dick Grayson is a Talon, Gen, Maybe Cloudy Late Afternoon Level Dark, Not Moonless Starless Night Level Dark, non-permanent major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:08:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6296479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick Grayson died at the age of eight.<br/>If only he could have stayed that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Was Eight Years Old

He was eight years old and he was falling.

He was falling, and he knew he should be afraid, but he wasn't.  Because he was Dick Grayson and he was eight, and he had never learned to be afraid of gravity.

The ropes had snapped.

The ropes had snapped, and gravity had cheated, because that was the only way he could ever have beaten a Flying Grayson.

But the Graysons didn't just let gravity win without putting up a fight.  In that tiniest of split seconds, as the ropes broke, Dick had, on instinct, pushed off and angled his body to fall towards his parents, and his parents had done the same.

It took three seconds to fall from the top of the trapeze to the hard, deadly ground.

Three seconds is a long, long time when you're falling.

In the first second he heard his cousin, Johnny, scream. In the first second he reached out and grasped the hands of his parents and saw, out of the corner of his eye, his aunt and uncle and cousin forming a triangle of their own.

For the next two he simply fell.

His mother stared into his eyes, her face, stubbornly, fiercely,  _furiously_ unafraid. 

His father's face held, for one fraction of a moment, a look of disbelief and terror, before he reached out and grasped the hand of his son.  Then, in those last two seconds his father smiled a wry, sad smile, as if to say to gravity, "Well, old friend I suppose it's only fair you win this one."

Two seconds, that's how long they fell like that.  But it felt longer

He was eight years old, and he was falling.  But he wasn't afraid.

Because as he fell he held fast to the warm, strong hands of his mother and father, and he smiled his best, most brilliant smile.

He was eight and he was about to die.   And there's no universe in which that was okay.  But as he fell he smiled, because if he had to go, this is the way he'd choose to do it.  

Together.

 

* * *

 

 

He was eight years old and he wasn't dead.

He was eight years old and he was alone.

His mind wasn't working properly and he couldn't remember much of anything, but he knew that these two things were wrong.

He wasn't dead, but he wasn't entirely sure he was alive, either.

He was cold.

People came.  Sometimes they poked him with needles, sometimes they gave him food.  They told him about his purpose as a Talon, told him how he was a tool of the Court, told him how they would make him perfect instrument of death.

They never said anything that didn't sound like it had been memorized beforehand.

He was alone.

Somehow, he was sure that that was the wrongest thing of all.

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow this turned out way shorter than I thought it would.


End file.
